Copyright

Please note that unless otherwise specified, all photos on this blog are produced, owned and copyrighted by the artist. She would appreciate it if you would not indiscriminately "borrow" the photos without at least mentioning where you got them. Thanks for your attention to this detail.

Month: January 2013

Here are some pictures of the area where I grew up. Whenever I drive home, I always have this feeling when I see the hills of Northwest corner that I am home and everything is going to be okay. It’s difficult not to see beauty wherever you look, even on a gray day.

The day is winter gray. There is a sheen of ice on my car and the trees are dripping with the cold rain that fell overnight. It is the end of January and I am right on track to be getting tired of the grayscale outside. I am craving some saturated color. So I started looking through my archives and found pictures from a day spent in my friend Mary’s basement studio last year. I was intrigued by how organized and colorful everything is, it just invites you to sit down and create something. It also invited me to take pictures to remind me of how fun it can be to be an artist. What other job requires you to look at colored pens, funky scissors, cool handmade paper and an assortment of pliers before you start “working”?

Click here to check out Mary’s web site to see pictures of how she uses color in her flower paintings.

As I was leaving the nursing home the other day, I had to wait for two people to leave the elevator before I could get in. One was an elderly man with a walker and the other was a woman, perhaps his wife, who walked very slowly. As the doors to the elevator started to close, I heard him say to her; “First person to the room wins…ready, set….”

I laughed all the way to the first floor.

Sometimes art is about finding the humor in an existence that often can seem humorless.

Twelve days after my record breaking trip to Connecticut, I returned home today. Another transition in my aging father’s life took place this past week and I am exhausted on all levels. I had little energy left for conscious “art” to happen in my life, especially over the last couple of days. But as I was nearing my house, I saw two little boys standing together near the road, intently concentrating on something that one of them was holding. The first boy was wearing a fluffy winter hat and the other boy was wearing the 2013 version of a Davy Crockett raccoon hat complete with the tail. It made me smile.

I woke up this morning in the guest room of my dad’s house to the sound of the snow plow. It snowed about four inches overnight and the snowplow arrived about 6:45 a.m. The window of the first floor guest room faces the driveway and has a small-leaf rhododendron outside. As the plow moved back and forth, the headlights created a leafy shadow movie on the closed window blinds. I watched the dance, fascinated and wishing I could record it but knowing that it would take too long to set up the camera. So once again, I will have to keep the memory in my head as long as possible.